The Hungry Hearts

by Verena Spilker

A while ago I was reading through Jenny Woolworth’s fantastic women in punk blog and stumbled upon The Hungry Hearts, a self titled “multi media pin-up performance band” from Oslo that consists of six members and is not only making music and videos, but working on many different artistic levels.

The song, or more the video, that caught my attention was “In Your Face” that the Hungry Hearts declared as the international lesbian anthem. Starting and ending the video with a synchronized dance arrangement in the snow called “Hazuki-dance” it then moves into bits of live performance as well as filmed sequences that both go along with the story of the song. Not afraid of using explicit lyrics like “I want your pussy in my face, your fingers up my arse, your lips around my clit, your hands on my tits” and “I just wanna fuck you on the floor until your pussy’s sore” they tell the story of two women meeting and while one is falling in love, the other one just wants to be friends. Leaving the first one heartbroken, they meet again after a while and even though the latter one is there with a new girl, on seeing the girl she broke up with, she realizes that she is the person she really want’s to be with and should have never let her go in the first place.

Instead of calling this a typical lesbian way of starting (or screwing up) a relationship let’s just say that falling in love always bears a lot of complications, reciprocity is not easy to achieve, things that work on the first try are not easy to find, and that this is a picture that the Hungry Hearts painted quite colorfully.

I was thrilled by the song being so in your face and danceable at the same time that I just had to contact them, ask them if I could use their song for djing.

TQU: Where did you meet and how did the idea of starting The Hungry Hearts came about?

THH: Growing up I (Tonje) played football and the Hammond Organ. I am married to Edith, the lead singer of “In your face», who I met when studying fine art in a very rainy town called Bergen in Norway. Edith has a special calmness and stillness. Edith is a dedicated person, about to finish her PhD in Nursing Science. She also has the ability to keep a posture for a very long time.

All the members of THH bring different characteristics of the female soul, attitude and body into the group, shown for example by Edith’s fine frail calmness and the Persian touch in Mona.

Ingeborg, I discovered at a club where she stood with her back against the wall dressed in strange clothes. I thought she was trying to make a fake facade, like a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothes, so my first words to her were: “Your head doesn’t match the rest of your body”. Ingeborg did not know me, so she did not understand that this was a compliment…
But some years later, just after we had established THH in an evening of frustration, when everything had gone wrong, Ingeborg turned into “The Pantyhose Lady” or found her self – as I see it.

Line also studied fine art in Bergen, and we played in the same school band at the academy. In Stamsund theater-festival, Edith, Pantyhose Lady and I met her again when she participated in a performance called “The Star Saloon”, and knew we right away that we needed this tiny talker to join our new project: The Hungry Hearts. Line can be quiet for a long while, but suddenly her red little lips starts talking – telling stories, and when she begins her story, you get many small side stories within the main story.

Mona is a friend from when I played football – First I thought Mona was a mute girl with very observant eyes, but after a while Mona actually spoke some sentences. She is a Medical Doctor, but has a natural talent for lyrics and installation art, and after a whisky or two she gets this gift of talking about specific themes. She also has a special way of how to explain things both by talking and by using her expressive body in different ways. In the last months we also discovered that in her full blood body there is a full deep vocal and choir voice.

Edith discovered Henriette when they studied Nursing Science together. First I wanted Henriette to join us in a performance wearing just pantyhose and a bra, like Pantyhose Lady and walk across the stage, but she didn’t want to at that time. She later accepted to be in the music video for “In your face”. And now she is asking me all time “Oh Tonje maybe I should walk around just in pantyhose and a bra“ – so actually we have to lead her thoughts off that all the time. Henriette has a person inside her that becomes very dominant when she drinks gin and tonic and sings karaoke…

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[…] This is a good question, and because Hungry Hearts are a very efficient art pop unit, they’ve provided a series of cute informational graphics about themselves on their excellent website that tell you all you need to know. Need to know more? For a series of excellent anecdotes about how the gang got together, see here. […]